Photography News

Attn: CCA Residence Hall Students: R.A.W. Photos Wanted!

Posted on Thursday, August 26, 2010, by Clay Walsh

Break out your digital camera for CCA’s inaugural R.A.W. (Real Artists at Work) Photo competition—the college’s newest juried student competition that awards a $100 cash prize to each winner!

Students enter the competition by submitting their digital photographs online. Each image should offer an artistic, original perspective and follow the designated theme.

This year’s theme: Life within CCA’s residence halls.
That’s right—here’s your chance to show others in the community what CCA’s on-campus residential life looks like, as well as turn fellow hall residents into stars!

All student submissions are due by October 8, 2010.

Go now to the R.A.W. Photo Submission Form for entry rules and participation guidelines. Possible subjects:

• Community building on campus
• Late-night “studying”
• Community BBQs
• Roommate spotlights
• Door decor
• Residence hall potlucks
• Virtual room tour
• Themed community activities
• My RA: A day in the life
• Dining with friends
• College Avenue adventures
• More than a dorm . . .
• Webster Hall Hangouts
• Art projects in the making
• Lawn worshipping
• What’s up at Clifton
• Coffee talks
• Off to class

Students must be current living in CCA’s residence halls to be eligible. All submissions must be unique, high-resolution digital images (300 dpi recommended) and become the property of CCA. See R.A.W. Photo Submission Form for additional information and guidelines.

Oh, and remember the results of the competition will be made public in order to market the college, so keep it clean! (wink)

Categories: Featured First Year Photography Students Undergraduate Admissions

A Road Divided

Posted on Thursday, August 19, 2010, by Lindsey Westbrook

A Road Divided
Nazraeli Press Press, 2010
Hardcover, 64 pages, $75

Nazraeli Press is pleased to announce Todd Hido's new book of landscape photographs. Driving lonely roads on the outskirts of cities, Hido creates poignant images filled with inexplicable gravity, often fully disintegrated, recalling impressionist painting. He often frames the compositions from inside his car, photographing straight through the windshield, using it as an additional lens and bringing a sense of timing and moment.

Categories: Alumni Bookshelf Faculty Photography

Alumna Gaby Brink to Present at West Coast Premiere of AIGA's Living Principles as part of Earth Day Celebration

Posted on Tuesday, April 6, 2010, by Jim Norrena

This year's exciting Bay Area lineup of Earth Day Celebration activities includes CCA noted alumna Gaby Brink (Photography 1992; Graphic Design 1995), cochair of the AIGA Center for Sustainable Design (CFSD), presenting the West Coast premiere of the AIGA's Living Principles for Design on Thursday, April 22, at the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco.

The Living Principles for Design, coauthored by Phil Hamlett, also a cochair for AIGA Center for Sustainable Design, were "born out of the design profession’s need for an aspirational and actionable framework that provides designers and their clients with a common understanding of the core facets of sustainability and enables them to take action." Like much of today's effort to design with sustainability in mind, the project's development relies on the ongoing contributions of the design community at large.

Gaby has worked tirelessly to chart the organization’s long-term vision and promote the integration of sustainability strategies to design and  business communities at large. She has for the past three years been the lead producer of AIGA’s interdisciplinary design conference, Compostmodern, which has become "the preeminent destination for sustainability programming for designers of all stripes."

Gaby also is founder and executive creative director of Berkeley-based Tomorrow design firm, where she leads an interdisciplinary team of creative talents and strategists. According to the website, she is "a tireless advocate for building brands that are strategically sharp, unique in their marketplace and that succeed to connect with their audience in meaningful ways."

Categories: Alumni Awards and Accolades Graphic Design Photography Sustainability

Raymond Carver / Todd Hido

Posted on Wednesday, March 10, 2010, by Lindsey Westbrook

Raymond Carver: Short Story Collections
Vintage
Hardcover/paperback

Redesigning Raymond Carver's backlist for the 25th anniversary of Vintage Contemporaries, the publisher decided to use the stunning and luminous suburban night photography of Todd Hido (Photography faculty) for the covers. Hido says: "This might be one of the most important and significant things that my images are ever used for. A dream, really, to contribute something to such an amazing author's body of published work. When I read Carver I see pictures. It makes me lust after going out to hunt for places to shoot. When I discovered it, it put words, stories, and characters in my mind that I had been searching for. I instinctively knew these people from my past experiences—they totally resonated with me." Read more . . .

Categories: Awards and Accolades Bookshelf Photography

Witness #7

Posted on Monday, February 22, 2010, by Lindsey Westbrook

Witness #7
Nazraeli Press, 2009
Hardcover, 96 pages, $40

As guest editor of Witness #7, Todd Hido (Photography faculty) juxtaposes his own photographs of the vacant interiors of foreclosed homes—the first time this series has been published as a group—with portraits made by the Polish photographer Leon Borensztein in the 1980s. Hido's potent and surreal pictures of empty spaces include traces of lives previously lived, and Borensztein's portraits (set against generic backdrops in homes and businesses in Stockton, Fresno, and Bakersfield) metaphorically give form to the evicted families.

Categories: Bookshelf Photography

Larry Sultan, Longtime CCA Faculty Member, Dies at 63

Posted on Monday, December 14, 2009, by Lindsey Westbrook

photo by Kelly Sultan

We are very sad to report that one of CCA's most beloved faculty members, Larry Sultan, died of cancer on Sunday. He was a distinguished professor in both the undergraduate Photography Program and the Graduate Program in Fine Arts and had taught at CCA since 1988.

Tammy Rae Carland, chair of the Photography Program, says, "Larry Sultan was one of the most compassionate, generous educators I've ever known. He was a great mentor, a great teacher, a great colleague. He had a lot of success in his own career but continued to be vital to the Photography Program. He really cared about its pedagogical development, about keeping it current and lively. He was incredibly generous with his students, always sharing his network, his experience, his connections. He got a tremendous amount of pleasure out of teaching."

Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, says, "Larry Sultan was a leading figure in the Bay Area art community. He was one of our great friends and a gifted artist. His work has been shown in our museum regularly since the 1970s. His responses to our world have always been both intensely personal and wonderfully humane, accessible, intelligent, and sympathetic."

Larry Sultan was born in New York in 1946 and moved with his family to Southern California in 1949. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley. He received a BA in 1968 from the University of California at Santa Barbara and an MFA in 1973 from the San Francisco Art Institute. In San Francisco he was represented by Stephen Wirtz Gallery.

In addition to his teaching career and extensive commercial work for W magazine, Vanity Fair, and other important clients, he produced a large and widely influential body of personal work. His first major project was a collaboration with the artist Mike Mandel: a book of appropriated photographs titled Evidence and a subsequent exhibition organized by SFMOMA in 1977. The pictures came from the files of government agencies, corporations, and research institutions, offering a witty and provocative look at contemporary American culture.

In 1992 Sultan compiled the book and accompanying exhibition Pictures from Home. The decade-long project began when his father, a vice president at Schick Safety Razor Company, was forced into early retirement. Sultan started by photographing his parents and their home lives, then expanded the undertaking to include extensive diaristic writing, family artifacts, and stills from his parents' home movies.

Working in the San Fernando Valley on Pictures from Home led Sultan to his next project, The Valley, an investigation of suburban houses used as sets for pornographic films. Like Pictures from Home, the project focused on Southern California culture, engaging ideas of truth, fantasy, and artifice in the context of home and middle-class domesticity. The Valley was presented at SFMOMA in 2004 as a solo exhibition of more than 50 large-scale photographs shot between 1999 and 2003. In the pictures, mundane objects such as a roll of paper towels or a bored woman in high heels become symbolically charged, inviting speculation.

Sultan exhibited internationally throughout his career. His work is in the collections of SFMOMA; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate Modern, London. He received numerous grants and awards, including five NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Louis Tiffany Comfort Award, and a Fleishhacker Fellowship.

Read the New York Times obituary.

Categories: Featured Fine Arts Photography

XXII Eduardo León Jimenes Competition of Art Honors Graduate Student's Photography

Posted on Saturday, November 1, 2008, by Jim Norrena

Indhira Rojas Sanchez, Feminine Resistance (2006), digital photography

Graduate Design student Indhira Rojas (Indhira Susana Rojas Sánchez) earned top prize in the Fine Art Photography category at the XXII Eduardo León Jimenes Competition of Art (Concurso de Arte Eduardo León Jimenes). The exhibition is organized by Centro León in Santiago, Dominican Republic.

Indhira Rojas's diptych digital photography piece, Feminine Resistance (2006), reflects on themes of sexuality and aggression and will become a part of the institution's permanent collection. Each winning artist in the four categories—photography, painting, drawing, and installation—received a prize amount equivalent to approximately $7,000. Their works will be on exhibit at the Centro León from October 17, 2008, to January 25, 2009.

The biannual contest is the longest-running private art contest in the Caribbean that began in 1964 with the support of the Group León Jimenes. Local and international art creators and professionals who are associated with the visual arts come together to "promote a democratic exchange of ideas, practices and artistic genres, as well as to stimulate in the participants—artists and public in general—the critical observation, the taking part analysis, and the reflection." (Centro León)

For the XXII edition at the Center Leon, which took on organizing the contest beginning with the XX edition, its lounge has been composed of 66 works by 55 artists that capture a sampling of the Dominican Republic's diverse and political visual contribution to the arts via its emerging generations of artists. Personal or autobiographical topics among the works include environmental, rights of speech, genre, local matters (violence and corruption)—all of which radiate outward to depict a framework of a lager global concern.

Categories: Design Featured Photography

Gump's Hosts Lustrous Made in the Shade Art Gala to Benefit CCA

Posted on Tuesday, September 16, 2008, by Jim Norrena

Student-designed lampshades will be auctioned at the gala<br /> (photo by Zakary Zide)

Heads turned Wednesday, September 17, 2008, when Gump's—a purveyor of fine arts and crafts—hosted an over-the-top arts benefit: Made in the Shade. The gala paved the way for Gump's to give back to artists, with proceeds benefiting CCA in the form of an endowed scholarship.

Made in the Shade featured a silent auction where attendees could bid on custom-designed lampshades. While that in and of itself is a glowing idea, it gets brighter: several of the lampshades were designed by CCA students. Yet what's absolutely brilliant is that in order to illuminate the designs, models wore the one-of-kind lampshades atop their heads while on the catwalk! (Yes, it takes . . . gumption to pull off the old lampshade-on-the-head routine!)

Even if you didn't make the gala, you can continue to bid on 10 lampshades by visiting Clothes Off Your Back, but only until Friday, September 26. Don't miss your chance to wear a custom-designed lampshade on your head (or not) and help support the CCA scholarship that Gump's has so generously extended.

Several of the CCA participants were on hand mixing and mingling with supporters and answering questions about their designs.

Made in the Shade was an illuminating and inspired evening of high fashion (literally!) where once again those who wore the lampshades on their heads were the life of the party. The benefit gala was all in the name of art—only at this gala the familiar name was Gump's.

Event details:

Gump's San Francisco at 135 Post Street
Event starts at 6 p.m. (with cocktails & hors d'oeuvres)
Silent auction begins (ends at 9 p.m.)
Fashion show and live auction begin at 8 p.m.
Cost: $100 per ticket

For questions, please call Carmen Roberson at 415.984.9297.

CCA Participants

Kim Anno, Curtis Arima, Kelly Ball, David Cole, Jack da Silva, Marilyn da Silva, John de Fazio, Mark Eanes, Sally Elesby, Tony Esola, Chris Finley, Linda Geary, Camellia George, James Gobel, Katie Lewis, Deborah Lozier, Nathan Lynch, Nate Mahoney, Kari Marboe, KC Rosenberg, Marta Salas-Porras, Bryan Keith Thomas, Mariana Tocornal, Chano Uribe, Alison Yates, Zakary Zide, John Zurier

Remember, ask not what your lampshade can do for you, but rather what you can do with your lampshade.

—Anonymous

Categories: Ceramics Featured Industrial Design Photography

CCA Launches MBA in Design Strategy

Posted on Friday, August 31, 2007, by Brenda Tucker

Nathan Shedroff

Recognizing the increasing importance of design and its impact on the business world, California College of the Arts (CCA) has launched a new MBA in Design Strategy program, the first of its kind in the United States. Slated to enroll its inaugural class of students in fall 2008, the innovative program will unite the studies of design, finance, and organizational management in a unique curriculum aimed at providing students with tools and strategies to address today's complex and interconnected market.

CCA Provost Stephen Beal states, "Our goal is to create a center of thought on the synthesis of design and business and to train the next generation of leaders in the rapidly changing business environment."

The college expects to draw students from the worlds of both business and design. Leaders in these industries realize that effective innovation requires acumen in both fields. In a recent speech, Bruce Nussbaum of BusinessWeek declared, "CEOs and managers must know design thinking to do their jobs. CEOs must be designers and use their methodologies to run companies." Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO and a member of the program's advisory council, comments, "Business is a uniquely powerful force for change in the world, and designers have never had more opportunity to create positive impact than they have today by influencing what business does. The more designers understand about business, the more influential they will be."

Nathan Shedroff has been appointed chair of CCA's groundbreaking program. Shedroff is a pioneer in experience design, an approach that encompasses multiple senses and examines the common characteristics in all media that make experiences successful; he also works in the related fields of interaction design and information design. As a business consultant, he helps companies build better, more meaningful experiences for their customers. Shedroff speaks and teaches internationally, and he has written extensively on design and business issues. He authored Experience Design 1 in 2001, and his latest book, Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences (cowritten with two members of the Silicon Valley–based strategic consultancy Cheskin) explores how companies can create products and services specifically to evoke meaning in the eyes of their audiences and customers.

About the MBA in Design Strategy Program

The program's approach encompasses performance, strategy, innovation, and the encouragement of meaningful, sustainable social change. The curriculum combines lectures and seminars in business strategy, organizational development, management communication, leadership, entrepreneurship, and sustainability with practical studios and sponsored projects that put theory into practice in a dynamic, team-centric experience. Multiple media and approaches are used to explore customer and market needs, challenge assumptions, devise effective solutions, and communicate opportunities across a wide range of stakeholders.

To offer maximum flexibility to working professionals, the program is conducted through five once-a-month, four-day weekends of instruction and interaction, with online and networked study between these residencies. The schedule allows participants from all over the United States to maintain their careers while keeping in close contact with team members, faculty, and program staff.

The program has dedicated studio space on CCA's San Francisco campus for local students. Also available are model-making facilities, metal and wood shops, a laser cutter, a 3D-prototyping machine, paint booths, and studios for editing digital media, film, video, and sound.

For more information about the MBA in Design Strategy, see www.cca.edu/designmba.

Update: Chair Nathan Shedroff Speaks to BusinessWeek in April 2009.

Listen to the podcast.

Categories: Photography Press Releases